QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (26 page)

Amazonian Indians have been making instant gumboots since time immemorial by standing knee-deep in liquid latex until it dries.

The boots designed for, and named after, the Duke of Wellington in 1817 were made of leather. The first rubber boots didn’t appear until 1851, the year before the Duke died.

Rubber was a disastrous failure for clothing when first tried because it either melted all over you in hot weather or set as 
hard as granite in winter. The breakthrough came in 1839 when Charles Goodyear heated rubber mixed with sulphur and accidentally spilt some on the family stove.

Goodyear’s story is inspiring and tragic by turns. He struggled in desperate poverty all his life – six of his twelve children died of malnutrition – but rubber was his obsession and he never gave up trying to improve the qualities of what he called ‘vegetable leather’.

The process he had inadvertently discovered solved the rubber problem by giving it a stable consistency. In his excitement Goodyear shared his samples with Thomas Hancock and Charles Macintosh, who became successful British rubber merchants.

After analysing them, they were able to reproduce the process and patented it in 1843, calling it ‘vulcanisation’ after the Roman god of fire. Goodyear sued, unsuccessfully, and not for the first time was forced to spend time in a debtor’s prison – or his ‘hotel’ as he liked to call it.

He died, still deep in debt, although widely acclaimed for his vision and perseverance. He once wrote: ‘Life should not be estimated exclusively by the standard of dollars and cents. I am not disposed to complain that I have planted and others have gathered the fruits. A man has cause for regret only when he sows and no one reaps.’

Forty years after he died, his immortality was assured when the founders of the Goodyear Rubber Company, now the world’s largest, named their business in his honour. Their turnover in 2005 was $19.7 billion.

The word ‘Hello’.

The first written use of hello spelt with an ‘e’ is in a letter of Edison’s in August 1877 suggesting that the best way of starting a conversation by telephone was to say ‘hello’ because it ‘can be heard ten to twenty feet away’.

Edison discovered this while testing Alexander Graham Bell’s prototype telephone. Bell himself preferred the rather nautical ‘Ahoy, hoy!’

Edison used to shout ‘hello!’ into telephone receivers at Menlo Park Labs while he was working on improvements to Bell’s design. His habit spread to the rest of his co-workers and then to telephone exchanges until it became common usage. Before ‘hello’ was used, telephone operators used to say, ‘Are you there?’ or ‘Who are you?’ or ‘Are you ready to talk?’

Once ‘hello’ became standard the operators were called ‘hello girls’.

‘Hullo’ was used at the time purely to express surprise. Charles Dickens used the word in this way in
Oliver Twist
(1839) when the Artful Dodger first notices Oliver with a ‘Hullo, my covey! What’s the row?’

‘Halloo’ was used to call hounds and ferrymen and was also a favourite word of Edison’s. When he first discovered how to record sound (18 July 1877) the word he shouted into the machine (the strip phonograph) was ‘Halloo’: ‘I tried the experiment, first on a strip of telegraph paper, and found that the point made an alphabet. I shouted the word “Halloo! Halloo!” into the mouthpiece, ran the paper back over the steel point and heard a faint “Halloo! Halloo!” in return! I determined to make a machine that would work accurately, and gave my assistants instructions, telling them what I had discovered.’

The earliest recorded use of delegate badges saying ‘Hello, my name is…’ was at the first telephone operators’ convention in Niagara Falls in 1880.

Yes and no.

First, the ‘yes’. In 1947, at Harvard University, the US Navy’s Mark II computer, housed in a large un-airconditioned room, was brought to a standstill by a moth getting itself jammed in a relay switch. The operators removed the battered corpse of the insect and taped it next to the entry in the log book before restarting the machine.

The mechanical nature of this computer made it particularly vulnerable to insect interference. Most of the early computers, like ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and
Computer) at the University of Pennsylvania were electronic and used moth-proof vacuum tubes.

But was this the origin of the term ‘bug’? No. Used to mean an error or fault in a piece of machinery, the word ‘bug’ dates from the nineteenth century. The
OED
cites a newspaper report from 1889, in which Thomas Edison ‘had been up the two previous nights searching for a bug in his phonograph’. Webster’s dictionary also gives the modern meaning of ‘bug’ in its 1934 edition.

And regardless of what numerous books and websites say, ‘de-bugging’ was also being used before the moth brought things to a standstill at Harvard.

This is a rather satisfying example of life imitating language: a metaphor that, literally, came to life.

Cockroaches is the wrong answer.

Quite why so many of us persist in the belief that cockroaches are indestructible is an interesting subject in its own right.

They have been around a lot longer than we have (about 280 million years) and are almost universally hated as hard-to-control carriers of disease. Plus, they can live for a week without their heads. But they aren’t invincible and, since the groundbreaking research of Drs Wharton and Wharton in 1959, we have known they would be one of the
first
insects to die in a nuclear war.

The two scientists exposed a range of insects to varying degrees of radiation (measured in ‘rads’). Whereas a human will die at exposure to 1,000 rads, the Whartons concluded
that the cockroach dies at a dose of 20,000 rads, a fruit fly dies at a dose of 64,000 rads, while a parasitic wasp dies at a dose of 180,000 rads.

The king of radiation resistance is the bacterium
Deinococcus
radiodurans
which can tolerate a whopping 1.5 million rads, except when frozen, when its tolerance doubles.

The bacterium – fondly known by its students as ‘Conan the Bacterium’ – is pink and smells of rotten cabbage. It was discovered happily growing in a can of irradiated meat.

Since then it’s been found to occur naturally in elephant and llama dung, irradiated fish and duck meat and even in granite from Antarctica.

Conan the Bacterium’s resistance to radiation and cold, and its ability to preserve its DNA intact under these extreme conditions, have led NASA scientists to believe it might hold the clue to finding life on Mars.

Solving the Arab–Israeli conflict in the Middle East

No less a person than the inventor of lateral thinking himself, Edward de Bono, advised a Foreign Office committee in 2000 that the whole sorry business might be due, in part, to low levels of zinc found in people who eat unleavened bread, a known side-effect of which is aggression. He suggested shipping out jars of Marmite to compensate.

The popular belief that eating Marmite will keep mosquitoes at bay has no basis in scientific fact. Sadly, the B group vitamins present in Marmite (and beer for that matter)
don’t appear to have any effect on mosquito behaviour.

Marmite, the love-it-or-hate-it spread, was invented in 1902 in Burton-on-Trent by the Marmite Food Extract Company and contains yeast extract, salt, wheatgerm extract, niacin, thiamine, spices, riboflavin and folic acid.

The exact recipe is – you guessed it – ‘a closely guarded secret’. Since 2000 it’s been owned by Unilever, proprietors of Persil, Domestos, Colman’s, Cif, Cornetto and Impulse. Its annual sales exceed 24 million jars.

Marmite exerts a strange hold on British popular consciousness – its taste is one of the things that ex-pats claim they miss most about home. Bill Bryson has described it as ‘an edible yeast extract with the visual properties of an industrial lubricant’.

A
marmite
is a traditional French lidded cooking pot, the shape of which is echoed by that of the Marmite jar. The word originally meant ‘hypocrite’, deriving from
marmouser
or
marmotter
, ‘to murmur’ (perhaps because both hypocrites and cooking pots hide things from view and bubble away quietly).

A generation of television chefs have had us believe that the hottest bit of the chilli pepper is its seeds. Not so.

It is the central membrane to which the seeds are attached. The membrane contains the highest levels of capsaicin, the colourless, odourless compound that gives chillies their distinctive heat.

Chilli heat is measured using the Scoville Scale, created by American pharmacist Wilbur L. Scoville in 1912. In his early tests, Scoville mixed a range of chilli extracts dissolved in alcohol and diluted in sugar water. He asked a panel of testers to consume a range of concentrations of various chillies until they ceased to taste hot. A numerical scale was then devised according to the heat of the chillies.

A jalapeño pepper, for example, is said to have 4,500 Scoville Heat Units (SHU), because it has to be diluted 4,500-fold before it loses its heat.

The hottest chilli in the world is from Dorset, on the south-west coast of England. Michael and Joy Michaud’s Dorset Naga –
naga
is Sanskrit for ‘serpent’ – was grown on a plant from Bangladesh.

It was tested by two American laboratories in 2005, and came in at a palate-torching 923,000 SHU. Even half a small Naga would render a curry inedible, and consuming a whole one would mean a trip to hospital. Despite this, 250,000 Nagas were sold last year.

To put it in perspective, pure capsaicin powder delivers 15–16 million SHU. It is so hot that pharmacists who experiment with it must work in a filtered ‘tox room’ wearing a full protective body-suit with a closed hood to prevent inhalation.

There are an estimated 3,510 varieties of chilli.